North Dakota – update through April 2020

This is an older blog post, you will find one on more recent data here

These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 15,995 horizontal wells in North Dakota that started production from 2005 onward, through April.

Total production

North Dakota oil production fell by 200 thousand bo/d in April to 1.2 million bo/d, the largest m-o-m decline to date. This was of course all related to the disastrous oil price during the month (WTI at $16) and operators decided to shut in many wells. Still, 54 new wells came online during the month (vs. 108 in March), which simply shows the lag times involved in planning these operations.

Only 46% of these 16 thousand horizontal wells were in production for the full month, a percentage normally closer to 70%.

Supply Projection dashboard

With only 12 rigs drilling horizontal wells (according to the Baker Hughes rig count), our outlook for the state is not optimistic and production may drop by another 50% over time at this level, as you can easily find in our Supply Projection dashboard (select North Dakota in the state filter).

Directional surveys

We recently gathered all the directional surveys for North Dakota and Colorado. These surveys allow us to show the exact position of the wellbore paths and improve our lateral length calculations. See here for example the 234 horizontal wells in the highly productive Antelope field in McKenzie County, with at least 2 years of production history. The map shows in the background the detailed well paths of these and neighboring wells.

These wells recovered on average almost 240 thousand barrels of oil in the first 2 years.

Texas is next on our list for these directional surveys! We also plan to include these in our ShaleProfile Data service shortly.

Top operators

Continental Resources was the only major operator that decided to shut in many wells in April and its production dropped by 50 thousand bo/d (“Top operators”).

Advanced Insights

The ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate recovery” overview shows how these horizontal wells are heading towards their ultimate recovery. They are grouped by the year in which production started.

Finally

Our Supply Projection dashboard is updated every day, but especially on Friday when the new rig data becomes available.

[Update] On Friday we plan a new post on the Permian.

Sources

For these presentations, I used data gathered from the following sources:

• DMR of North Dakota. These presentations only show the production from horizontal wells; a small amount (about 40 kbo/d) is produced from conventional vertical wells.
• FracFocus.org

Brief manual

The above presentations have many interactive features:

• You can click through the blocks on the top to see the slides.
• Each slide has filters that can be set, e.g. to select individual or groups of operators. You can first click “all” to deselect all items. You have to click the “apply” button at the bottom to enforce the changes. After that, click anywhere on the presentation.
• Tooltips are shown by just hovering the mouse over parts of the presentation.
• You can move the map around, and zoom in/out.
• By clicking on the legend you can highlight selected items.
• Note that filters have to be set for each tab separately.
• The operator who currently owns the well is designated by “operator (current)”. The operator who operated a well in a past month is designated by “operator (actual)”. This distinction is useful when the ownership of a well changed over time.
• If you have any questions on how to use the interactivity, or how to analyze specific questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Enno Peters

Enno Peters is General Manager at Novi, where he has build an AI-driven data & analytics platform tailored for oil & gas operators and energy investors. Prior to Novi, Enno founded ShaleProfile which was acquired by Novi late 2021.